Gabe LaConte sits in an office where the walls are covered by what he knows best.

He is a promoter of four-, six- and eight-round fights. The fights before fighters become price-tagged entities. The ones before television contracts and title defenses. The ones where the names on the cardboard posters, which cramp the corner room and spill out onto a nearby sofa, are unrecognizable.

He admits the payout for these main events — a $2,000 check which, with a six-week training period comes out to below minimum wage — doesn’t amount to much.

But he has an argument.

With one disappointing high-profile pay-per-view bout after another, the loser going back to his dressing room with a sizable check to soften the blow, doesn’t he offer the sport at its purest? Aren’t the fights before the main event more intense when a reputation hangs on the line?

At the Robert Treat Hotel tonight at 7:30, LaConte’s First Round promotions will host a card featuring the likes of Richard Pierson (11-2, 8 K.O.), who is fighting Aaron “Homicide” Mitchell for the Fecarbox Title, a designation that could get Pierson ranked at his weight class.

Lavarn Harvell (10-0, 5 K.O.) will face Brian Donahue in the co-main event. And on that card, which is also tacked on the wall of LaConte’s office, sits a slew of other names he knows people won’t recognize for now. That’s the point.

“Do you believe that heart has anything to do with boxing? Do you believe that morale has anything to do with boxing? You may go down, but it doesn’t mean you’re going to lose,” he said.

“In these four-round fights, he learns to walk out to the ring, he learns to climb through the ropes. I think that these shows have created a lot of champions.”

The show will benefit Derek’s Dream foundation, a charity inspired by 13-year-old Derek DiGregorio, who suffers from ataxia telangiectasia.

To prove his theory, LaConte relies on name recognition. On these yellowing fight cards were kids named Art Gatti – later Arturo, a world title holder in two different weight classes. Shannon “The Cannon” Briggs, who held the WBO heavyweight title. “Smokin’” Bert Cooper, who once fought Evander Holyfield.

He remembers once, vividly, standing up at a pre-fight press conference before an event he was planning at the Robert Treat nearly 25 years ago now.

He asked guys like Briggs and Gatti to introduce themselves so he didn’t mispronounce their names and because he didn’t know anything about them.

He held today’s fight card in his hand, hoping that he could have the same problem 15 years later.

“I don’t know what else I can say about something that just started,” he said.